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::Sigh:: There is nothing logical about disbelief in God. It is NOT a logic problem . . . it is a brute fact premise problem. Brute fact premises are accepted by preference as givens. You either accept that our reality is the result of God or you don't. When you don't you are simply preferring to accept our ignorance about it as the premise rather than label it God. There is nothing logical about it.
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Originally Posted by minidiaz
it is a response to a lack of a factual brute premise problem.
huh? are you asserting atheists prefer to accept theists are ignorant rather than to place labels on the unknowable?
if that is what you meant....bzzzzzzzzzzt wrong try again.
atheists are in the neutral position about labels...make a claim....prove it.
Wrong. We currently do not know WHAT our reality IS nor WHY it IS. Yet we have plenty of factual evidence and knowledge that it IS and what its attributes are. Atheists accept and prefer ignorance about it rather than objectively acknowledge its ubiquity, scope, power and control over us as God.
Wrong. We currently do not know WHAT our reality IS nor WHY it IS. Yet we have plenty of factual evidence and knowledge that it IS and what its attributes are. Atheists accept and prefer ignorance about it rather than objectively acknowledge its ubiquity, scope, power and control over us as God.
Excuse me, but there's nothing objective about that knowledge, your only sources are some ancient texts that have no more epistemological value then any of the other ancient texts with contradictory accounts. I have no more reason to accept your account then I do the account in the Mayan Popol Vuh or the Australian Aboriginal conceptions of the Dreamtime. There's nothing special about the model living in your head that makes it objective truth I'm refusing to look at, it remains an unsubstantiated hypothesis with no justifications aside from tradition and corresponding emotional attachments. As such, refusing to accept it is not illogical.
Wrong. We currently do not know WHAT our reality IS nor WHY it IS. Yet we have plenty of factual evidence and knowledge that it IS and what its attributes are. Atheists accept and prefer ignorance about it rather than objectively acknowledge its ubiquity, scope, power and control over us as God.
Perhaps you can elucidate your position, sir. I do agree that we (humanity) have limited understanding of the mechanics of the universe and the whys of it all. Perhaps there is no answer. Is that so terrible? It is easy to see that life on Earth overcame overwhelming odds to begin, and successful species (ours included) made it this far by a great deal of adaptation. Earth itself began its life against great odds (like many other planets). Questions and mysteries should arouse our inner analytic natures. Do you suggest that because we cannot solve for x, that we simply give it an arbitrary value (god) and stop seeking the true answers? That is dangerous and ignorant.
I say, that it is the religious believers that "prefer ignorance" because it is often the case when their beloved archaic narratives clash with the times and/or social and scientific advancements, the overall reaction from believers has been one of radical repulsion. Exempli gratia; Seeing women as anything more than gestation crates and wet holes, refusing life saving blood transfusions on "religious" or "moral" grounds because mixing blood is "wrong", halting research on stem cells over unwarranted concerns of the sentience of cells (because every sperm is sacred...but "god"/nature commits the majority of early and late miscarriages), "holy war" on innocents to prove the verity of the particular delusion, and so on. I wonder what would happen if someone merely substituted "imaginary friend" for "god" or Jesus in a sentence like: "Jesus is my strength and my savior." Of course, you'd get the side eye.
Society makes an allotment for religion and it is not considered a mental disease to be religious, but it is just interesting to note how quickly one would be labeled insane or deluded if another term was used in the context of the deity. Since the god cannot be quantified or qualified, what exactly are believers worshiping and devoting their lives to anyway? A stack of outdated manuscripts that are irrelevant to life in our time? Most interesting use of sound reasoning. Many religious people are moral and decent, but they do not own the monopoly on either trait by virtue of the religiousness...but here is the selling line of most religions.
Atheists accept and prefer ignorance about it rather than objectively acknowledge its ubiquity, scope, power and control over us as God.
That is a good point. I am completely ignorant about the cause of gravity, but that has never bothered me. I accept that gravity is present and I have learned how to deal with it.
I don't need to envision some kind of 'god' to help me understand the 'ubiquity' and 'power' and 'scope' of gravity.
Good points, but regarding the section in bold, I've long wondered if some people have a higher tolerance for cognitive dissonance than others, and if this tolerance is not so much a side effect of less logical minds, but a skill in itself.
Atheists are many of the scientists and brilliant thinkers, but regarding atheists I've met...they don't seem any more logical than most theists I've met, until they begin a debate about deep philosophical concepts (which atheists win 97% of the time, agnostics win 2% of the time, and deists win the last 1% of the time, and nobody else wins...ever). Deeply religious persons are often architects, college professors, and managers. They are frequently very creative. They merely seem to cease questioning when certain topics come up. They can think about those topics. They merely don't seem to. Any lack of skill people have at arguing about those advanced philosophic concepts may very well be merely because they haven't done it before...rather than having innately less logical minds.
I apologize if I have misinterpreted some of your intended points.
Your post syncs perfectly with what I wrote, all the way through seemly-logical people not subjecting their religious beliefs to logical analysis in their own minds. Your last sentence refers to arguing or explaining the religious beliefs to others, and offers the possibility that these people could (possibly) logically defend their religious beliefs--if they were forced to explain why they believe as they do, enough times.
I should note that pretty much all the truly logical thinkers I know also have a near-obsessive need to understand how things work. It is this need that develops logical thought processes over the decades of adulthood: faulty logic leads to erroneous conclusions, and an intellectual hates being wrong. They never stop thinking and analyzing--they will stay up all night trying to figure out something they do not understand, or talking to another intellectual on some interesting point like Einstein's "spooky action at a distance," or Schrodinger's cat.
So to believe in a God, and therefore accept entire religious paradigm, but to "cease questioning when certain topics come up," and to simply cease thinking about them, flies in the face of the most fundamental driving force of the Intellectual: the obsessive need to understand reality, in order to predict and have some control over the future. True, the psychological wall exists against logically examining religious beliefs, but I still think those walls would eventually fail in the logic-driven Intellectual--absent some overwhelming emotional need that swamps out the obsessive need to understand.
Note also that not all higher-status jobs require a logical mind--architects are more artist than engineer; college professors in non-STEM fields are chosen for success in their particular fields (say, creative writing); and managers cover all fields and skill sets. So simply having such a position does not mean the person is a logical thinker or a true Intellectual.
Let's consider your hypothesis that religious people might be able to argue their beliefs logically if they thought them through. Say two logical people (a Christian Entrepreneur and an atheist Engineer) were asked to present their views on how humankind came to be, to a logical person that had never heard of either God or evolution (say, the Ambassador of a group of people who had been isolated for thousands of years and never thought about their origins). The Entrepreneur and the Engineer would be given 20 years of advance notice, so that they had time to fully analyze their beliefs, and practice presenting them and defending them in a logical manner.
Given these constraints, is it not obvious that that there's no way a logical-thinking Ambassador could give credence to the idea of a human-like supernatural entity that shows absolutely no evidence of its existence?
And no, a book is NOT evidence of God's existence (any more than Tolkien's trilogy is proof that Hobbits and Wizards exist).
...You either accept that our reality is the result of God or you don't. When you don't you are simply preferring to accept our ignorance about it as the premise rather than label it God. There is nothing logical about it.
You think God always existed, and he created man.
I think reality always existed, and life evolved, then man evolved.
Your mythology doesn't answer the question you think it does.
I think reality always existed, and life evolved, then man evolved.
Your mythology doesn't answer the question you think it does.
Always existed? Cosmology and background radiation does seem to confirm that the universe has existed a for a very specific, finite period of time. But let's not get too off track.
I have to apologise for only being able to rep one post per person. Several of you deserve more.
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